“And then I came to the shed, and I saw fresh scratches on the lock, as though someone had tried to open it with a wrong key. So I returned to get my gun, and — there you were.”
I nodded. There was a little more brandy in the glass at my side. I sipped it carefully. “I must have frightened you, coming for you with that iron bar,” I said. “But — who did it? Who kidnapped me and brought me here?”
“We will find out,” she said in a voice like ice breaking. “We will find out.”
There was a silence. The motherly woman came back into the room carrying a tray loaded with breakfast — hot coffee, glasses of fruit juice, half a dozen native cold dishes in little glass bowls.
“Drink coffee,” said Maria Posador stonily. “It will aid the refreshing stimulus of the brandy you have taken.”
I shivered a little, although the room was very warm. I said, “You know, if it hadn’t been for that cable I trod on — which knocked me off my balance — I’d be dead now. I’m sure of it.”
She gave a grave nod. “I have no doubt that was what was intended.”
Something clicked in my mind, and I gave a grunt of astonishment. “That cigarette you gave me last night — was it — was that cigarette doped?”
I half-rose to my feet, my mind flooding with suspicion. She looked at me calmly.
“Not so far as I am aware. Who could have obtained my own case? Who could have ensured that I gave you that cigarette and no other?”
“You could,” I said. There was silence for a while. “I could,” she said at last. “But in that case — would I have missed my aim?”
“Possibly. You might be — oh, hell, you wouldn’t have had to go to all that trouble.” I subsided, feeling that I had said several stupid things.
“Of course not,” was the calm comment. “You are a weapon in a struggle which trembles on the verge of open civil war. Enough people hate you for it to be possible to find an assassin to destroy you. No, señor! Your destruction was to have been linked to mine, plainly! Well, that has failed. But it may be tried again. I would suggest to you that you leave the country at once, today, but some formality would certainly be found to hinder your going…I am sorry that you should be involved as you are. But, as you yourself have said to me, we are at the mercy of impersonal forces.”
“I don’t think these forces are so impersonal,” I said grimly. “I think I’m being pushed around by individuals’ whims — as though I were one of those men who march around that life-size chessboard at Presidential House! What kind of impersonal force carried me up here from my hotel room and put me where it was an even chance you would think I was lying in ambush for you? It looks to me as if someone — whoever, Vados or Diaz or someone — were pushing me and you about exactly like bits of carved wood being shoved from square to square on a board!”
“Señor,” said Maria Posador heavily, “you must understand that for twenty years el Presidente — with the guidance of the late but not lamented Alejandro Mayor — has ruled his country by means direct and indirect. He has moved not individuals but whole masses of people at his whim. Once, a long time ago, I was capable of feeling as you do about the fact — but I was very young when my husband…”
Her voice broke suddenly. “Sixteen? Seventeen?” I suggested gently.
She nodded, not looking at me. “Seventeen. I was married very young. Oh, things have changed for me — once I swore I would follow where he had gone, once I swore I would wear black until I died, again I thought I would enter a convent… Then here I am, as you see me.” She gestured up and down, indicating her tailored shirt, her biscuit-colored slacks, with all their air of some expensive resort.
I cupped my hands around the thick pottery mug of coffee I had been given; there was still much heat in it, and it stung my palm where the skin had been grazed.
I said, “Up till last night I was proposing to get out of Ciudad de Vados as fast as I could, and be glad to see the last of the place. Now I’m not any longer just waiting to collect my pay. I’m not interested in that sort of thing anymore. It’s a different kind of pay I want, and who’s going to settle the account I don’t know. But someone is. Someone most definitely is going to pay.”
XXXI
The motherly woman scuttled into the room, her face wide-eyed and anxious. “Señora!” she exclaimed. “There are police cars at the gate! Pancho will try to delay them, but it cannot be for long.”
Maria Posador reacted with instant decision. “That will probably be because someone has warned them to come here and seek a corpse. Quickly — you must go into the cellar. I have a concealed retreat arranged down there, against emergencies.”
We were already moving as she finished explaining; it was like a priest’s hole in an old English house, comfortable, well ventilated, and completely hidden. It was a relic of her early days after her return, when she was still half afraid that Vados regarded her as a menace to be eliminated at the most convenient moment.
“Myself, I have never had to use it,” she added. “But — others have. More than once political opponents of Vados have found safety here; I wished to offer refuge to Fats Brown, but he chose otherwise, and…”
And I was scrambling inside.
It was awkward with my injured arm, but I made it, and I waited there tensely for more than an hour, wishing I’d asked for cigarettes to ease the strain.
Eventually the houseman let meout and helped me back upstairs, where I found Maria Posador sitting in a chair and tapping thoughtfully on the arm with perfectly kept nails.
“Would you care to guess,” was her first remark, “who it was who grew worried about you and sent the police here to make inquiries?” I shook my head. “It was Señor Angers.”
“Good God! But — oh, I suppose it was on some flimsy excuse like you having been the last person I was seen talking to last night.”
“You have a good understanding of the minds of our police. Of course, they work on uncomplicated principles. I managed to drive them away temporarily, but I must arrange to conceal the effects of the bullet I fired at you — it will have left traces on the wall, of course, and may have broken something, though I do not know. And someone, it is said, heard the shot. I think it would certainly be best for both of us if you were to remain in concealment here for a little.”
“I’ll cheerfully keep out of the way of the police till this evening,” I said. “But I have a date tonight that I wouldn’t miss for the world. I’m invited to dinner at Presidential House, and I want to tell Vados what I think of his beloved city now.”
She smiled. “I learned very early in life that one’s involvements go always deeper than one intends. One is linked with a particular world. Often one would prefer it otherwise. But there are certain ties and obligations that cannot be dissolved. Were I to have abandoned my country, moved somewhere where I was unknown, I should still have been fastened securely to my old self by knowledge of duty unfulfilled…” Wistful sadness filled the mellow voice, the violet eyes. “Very well, then,” she finished in a brisker tone. “You will remain here until evening. You will require various things — clothing, and so on, which I will obtain for you. And when you wish to go to Presidential House a hired car will call for you. The driver will be a discreet man; whatever has been said in the city regarding your disappearance, he will ask no questions.”
Twice in the course of the day the police returned — the first time armed with a search warrant, which implied that somebody at any rate was pretty sure where I was; the second time in the person of el Jefe O’Rourke, who apologized to Señora Posador for bothering her and gave the interesting news that Vados had turned the heat on him. As far as he himself was concerned, he was satisfied that I wasn’t here.